New Year, New You?

If you’ve ever wanted a career as a singer, now may be the best time in the past five years to go for it. Last year major record labels in the UK signed 156 new artists and spent more money on artist development than entire sectors like pharmaceutical companies and car manufacturers!!

This clearly goes to show how important artist development is for success in the music industry. We are talking over £178 MILLION being spent on developing artists in the last year alone.

Now while that might sound like a lot of money, British music boosted the UK economy by £4.1 billion pounds last year. This is therefore a worthy investment for the return.

If you want to be one of the 156 or more artists who are likely to be signed to major labels next year, you should consider starting your artist development now. Consider any investment in yourself against the potential return to you later on down the line – you know that it’s not only needed, it’s a requirement of record labels and when they are looking to sign new artists it makes sense that they will go for those artists who have the most potential, training and ‘readiness’ to bring to market.

I know this blog sounds very business-like, but this is the music business and artists are in effect products that are brought to market. You need to think of your value right now and then think about how you can add value to yourself to make your product all the more desirable and stand out against other artists trying for the same career. Artist development is the way to go.

You’ve probably never seen an advert for 360 Artist Development and that’s because we are lucky enough that we don’t need to advertise. Our development programme attracts highly talented and dedicated artists from across the country and space is regularly full or highly limited but it still surprises us how many people are not prepared to travel away from where they live in order to improve themselves. Don’t be that person, travel where you think the right match for your career development fits the best, where you find the team of people you trust to help you into your chosen career. The reality of being an artist will mean long periods of travelling, touring, recording, practise and promotion and record companies will expect artists to have a can-do attitude. Although more people got signed last year than any other year in the past 5, it was still only 156 people and therefore in order to be one of the elite you need to make sure that you:

Are absolutely dedicated to this career

Have a willingness to learn and develop

Are willing to put countless hours into nurturing a fanbase

Take lessons in singing/performance (and/or complete a development programme)

Are strong enough to take rejection time and time again and still bounce back – (Rita Ora was dropped from major labels THREE times before she got to where she is now!)

Set realistic goals to achieve at different time points with an overall objective of where you want to end up

The great thing about an artist development programme is that you don’t have to be able to write songs or play an instrument. You will have a team of producers, engineers, songwriters and teachers around you to help YOU grow in whatever way YOU need – no classroom environments or boring lectures!

Whatever you decide to do in 2016 we hope that you succeed in achieving musical goals and we hope to see some of you join our musical family in the near future.